Knowledge and the Nature of Action

The existence of essentially intentional actions has been recently challenged by some philosophers of action. In my paper, I will use Michael Thompson’s naive action theory to argue for the view that essentially intentional actions exist, or naive essentialism. My paper has four parts. First, I present some key features of naive action theory and the broader Anscombean tradition of action theory. One central feature is the concept of “naive rationalization”, which states actions can be explained by other actions in virtue of a grounding relationship between parts and wholes. More specifically, an action p can be explained by being seen as a metaphysically dependent “sub-action” of a larger intentional action q. For example, an action of “egg-mixing” can be explained by being seen as a part of a larger action of “omelet-making”. Second, I utilize the aforementioned key concepts of naive action theory to distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions. Essentially intentional actions are intentional in themselves as opposed to being intentional in virtue of some other action, and are thereby never sub-actions. Accidentally intentional actions are intentional in virtue of something else, and are thereby always sub-actions. Third, I provide the Grounding Argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions. In broad strokes, the argument demonstrates that given accidentally intentional actions are always dependent on some other action in order to be intentional, essentially intentional actions must exist to serve as the terminus of such chains of dependence. Lastly, I will briefly respond to a possible objection to my argument. The significance of my paper is that it expands upon naive action theory, demonstrates the existence of essentially intentional actions, and illuminates the asymmetrical metaphysical and explanatory relationship between distinct kinds of action.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2001

This paper argues that the role of knowledge in the explanation and production of intentional action is as indispensable as the roles of belief and desire. If we are interested in explaining intentional actions rather than intentions or attempts, we need to make reference to more than the agent's beliefs and desires. It is easy to see how the truth of your beliefs, or perhaps, facts about a setting will be involved in the explanation of an action. If you believe you can stop your car by pressing a pedal, then, if your belief is true, you will stop. If it is false, you will not. By considering cases of unintentional actions, actions involving luck and cases of deviant causal chains, I show why knowledge is required. By looking at the notion of causal relevance, I argue that the connection between knowledge and action is causal and not merely conceptual

This paper is a response to chapters 3 and 4 of Truls Wyller's book Objektivitet og jegbevissthet ('Objectivity and Self-consciousness'), 1 concerning the theory of action. Wyller presents here a critique of the causal theory of action, arguing instead that actions must be explained non-causally; the views are meant to mesh with the Kant-inspired transcendental idealist framework for thinking about mind and world explored and defended in the book more generally, as well as in other writings (e.g. Wyller 2010). Though I have learned much from Wyller's clear expositions of Kantian themes in relation to contemporary philosophical perspectives, I confess at once to having little sympathy with transcendental idealism. In my view, we should aim to understand thought and action, along with everything else about human beings, in as fully a naturalistic way as possible, that is, as phenomena continuous with the rest of nature -physical and/or biological -not as preconditions for the latter. I will not be directly arguing for this naturalistic view and against transcendental idealism here. What I will be arguing is that Wyller's observations about action, which aim to undermine one very well known causalist account of it due to Donald Davidson, can in fact be reconciled with a causal -and hence broadly naturalistic -understanding of it once we understand the notion of cause in a more appropriate way than Davidson does.

In my paper, I present an interpretation of Elizabeth Anscombe's view of essentially intentional actions in her book Intention, which I call “essentialism”. I use textual evidence from Intention to argue that Anscombe believes that descriptions of accidentally intentional actions are grounded upon descriptions of essentially intentional actions. Then, I provide an argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions using Anscombe’s principles. Lastly, I present three potential problems for the view that no essentially intentional actions exist, or “accidentalism”. In conclusion, I mention some implications for the Anscombean tradition of action theory.

Philosophers generally agree that there is a special epistemic relation that an agent bears to her own intentional actions. But what exactly does an agent know about her actions by acting intentionally? The traditional account, which is also the dominant account, answers this question as follows: what an agent knows in virtue of acting intentionally is her intention, and what actually happens is known separately by observation. I will argue against the traditional account, and defend the view that the object of an agent's nonevidential knowledge of her intentional actions is what actually happens. In other words, practical knowledge by itself is a way of knowing how things are outside of the mind and body. I will start with a reminder: however surprising the view I defend might sound to a philosophical ear, in fact in ordinary discourse we do take an agent's knowledge to be a way of knowing what is happening. Of course this would not be enough to establish the truth of the view. After all, it is the job of philosophy to point out distinctions which go unnoticed in ordinary discourse. So I will first consider what motivates the traditional account, in order to uncover the philosophical concerns that advise against taking ordinary discourse at face value. Then I will argue that, while the motivation for the traditional

Context Dependence in Language, Action, and Cognition, 2021

According to Anscombe, acting intentionally entails knowledge in action. This thesis has been near-universally rejected due to a well-known counterexample by Davidson: a man intending to make ten legible carbon copies might not believe with confidence, and hence not know, that he will succeed. If he does, however, his action surely counts as intentional. Damaging as it seems, an even more powerful objection can be levelled against Anscombe: while acting, there is as yet no fact of the matter as to whether the agent will succeed. Since his belief that he will is not yet true while his action is in progress, he cannot possibly know that he is indeed bringing about the intended goal. Knowledge in action is not only unnecessary for intentional action, it seems, but-at least as regards success-bound types of action-impossible to attain in the first place. In this paper I argue that traditional strategies to counter these objections are unsatisfactory and propose a new account of knowledge in action which has two core features: (i) It invokes an externalist conception of justification which not only meets Davidson's challenge, but also casts doubts on the tacit internalist premise on which his example relies. (ii) Drawing on recent work about future contingents by John MacFarlane, the proposed account conceives of claims to knowledge in action as assessment-sensitive so as to overcome the factivity objection. From a retrospective point of evaluation, previous claims about future events and actions can not only be deemed as having been true, but also as having been known.

Reasons, Justification and Defeaters, Oxford University Press, 2020

One can intentionally do something only if one knows what one is doing while they are doing it. For example, one can intentionally kill one’s neighbor by opening their gas stove overnight only if one knows that the gas is likely to kill the neighbor in their sleep. One can intentionally sabotage the victory of one’s rival by putting sleeping drugs in their drink only if one knows that sleeping drugs will harm the rival’s performance. And so on. In a slogan: Intentional action is action guided by knowledge. This essay reviews some motivations for a ‘knowledge-centered psychology’ — a psychology where knowledge enters center stage in an explanation of intentional action (§2). Then it outlines a novel argument for the claim that knowledge is required for intentional action (§3) and discusses some of its consequences (§§4-5)

Ergo

We argue that any strong version of a knowledge condition on intentional action, the practical knowledge principle, on which knowledge of what I am doing (under some description: call it A-ing) is necessary for that A-ing to qualify as an intentional action, is false. Our argument involves a new kind of case, one that centers the agent's control appropriately and thus improves upon Davidson's well-known carbon copier case. After discussing this case, offering an initial argument against the knowledge condition, and discussing recent treatments that cover nearby ground, we consider several objections. One we consider at some length maintains that although contemplative knowledge may be disconnected from intentional action, specifically practical knowledge of the sort Anscombe elucidated escapes our argument. We demonstrate that this is not so. Our argument illuminates an important truth, often overlooked in discussions of the knowledge-intentional action relationship: intentional action and knowledge have different levels of permissiveness regarding failure in similar circumstances.

How much knowledge is necessary for action? This question is fundamental because it suggests that the link between knowledge and action is debatable, that there is no given, fixed causal relationship between knowledge and action. In addition, there seems to be no fixed causal direction. Knowledge can be a prerequisite for action but also a consequence of an action. My opening question relates two key words in psychology. One of them is knowledge, about which a large body of knowledge exists (e.g., Halford, Wilson, & Phillips, 2010)—about its different types (e.g., procedural , declarative), styles of acquisition (implicit, explicit), and degrees of accessibility (conscious, subconscious, unconscious). The other word is action, about which there are various theories describing human behavior with respect to intention (e.g., Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010). In this introductory section I try to give an overview of these conceptions and of the relation between knowledge and action. The issues around the keywords knowledge and action—which constitute the title of a book by Frey, Mandl, and von Rosenstiel (2006)—are captured by the following four main aspects, which generate corresponding questions.

Philosophical Issues, 2012

Can we have free will or moral responsibility if determinism is true? The question remains hotly disputed. I suggest that we can make progress on the free will debate by attending to the nature of the explanation of human action. In previous writing, I have defended a non-causal account of action explanation, according to which common sense psychological explanations of human behavior are irreducibly teleological. I give a brief summary of this account in section 1. In section 2 I give an overview of the free will debate and suggest that teleological account of action would seem to make determinism irrelevant to freedom and agency; I suggest that compatibilism becomes a very natural and plausible view. In sections 3-6, I analyze four specific arguments for incompatibilism, and I diagnose how these arguments go wrong, given the teleological account of action explanation. I conclude in section 7.

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

Episteme, 2015

Pragmatic encroachment offers a picture of knowledge whereby knowledge is unstable. This paper argues that pragmatic encroachment is committed to more instability than has been hitherto noted. One surprising result of the arguments in this paper is that pragmatic encroachment is not merely about changes in stakes. All sorts of practical factors can make for the presence or absence of knowledge on this picture – stakes are just one factor among many that are knowledge-depriving. In this way, the focus in the literature on ‘stakes-sensitivity’ is misleading. Furthermore, insufficient attention has been paid to the variety of ways in which on this view pragmatic factors affect knowledge: pragmatic factors are not merely knowledge-depriving but are also knowledge-inducing.

Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2017

ABSTRACT:This paper examines intellectualism in the theory of action. Philosophers use ‘intellectualism’ variously, but few question its application to views on which knowledge of facts—expressible in that-clauses—is basic for understanding other kinds of knowledge, reasons for action, and practical reasoning. More broadly, for intellectualists, theoretical knowledge is more basic than practical knowledge; action, at least if rational, is knowledge-guided, and just as beliefs based on reasoning constitute knowledge only if its essential premises constitute knowledge, actions based on practical reasoning are rational only if any essential premise in it is known. Two major intellectualist claims are that practical knowledge, as knowing how, is reducible to propositional knowledge, a kind of knowing that, and that reasons for action must be (propositionally) known by the agent. This paper critically explores both claims by offering a broad though partial conception of practical knowled...

Routledge, 2018

Philosophy Research Archives, 1987